Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period
were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions
followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s
first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas
Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose
was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope,
repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society
(founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier
writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his
generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and
the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and
comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning
(i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive
method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived
systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory).
The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the
preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose,
however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by
a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are
shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively
aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were
published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson
(Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,”
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first
by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628).
Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre
were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane
State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker.
Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter
Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and somber
skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too
saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in
pragmatism.
Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or
Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic
prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-
endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and
Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the
loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style
that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of
François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In
the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas
Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic
prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years’ War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The
search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as
voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers
who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and
Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in
his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton’s tracts against the bishops
(1641–42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm.
Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of
the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his
hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or
modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that
it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; “Lycidas” (1637), a
pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque
against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in
chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in
Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as the
intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first
in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the
Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed
himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent
oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal
slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and
society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned
out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old
public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of assumptions
and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to
the new age.
