Elizabethan poetry and prose
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity
by writers of every persuasion and caliber.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing
confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education,
which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and
Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.
Development of the English language
Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literatureA brief discussion
of the King James Bible's influence on English literature.
See all videos for this article
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas
Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even
archery argued in favor of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward
linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art,
translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took
place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it
—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of the Bible,
from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s
combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never
spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical
chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the
tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by
popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the
tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists
include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George
Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets,
who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic
themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy,
restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions
1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality
is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s
Wife” are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to
be influential on the drama.
Sidney and Spenser
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as
it is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself demonstrated in his
sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582, published 1591). His
Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The
revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were
added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of
heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic
etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion
of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic
warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism
against patience, rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with his situation as
an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in Spenser’s life. He enjoyed the patronage of the earl of
Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been
suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene
(1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the
hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the Calendar, an
expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his
epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central
poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic
epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests
of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself.
Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court
festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knights’
adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled
sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the
hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s
increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the
poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the
fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability
Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of
eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and
graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and
sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but
faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For
Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing
one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably
in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]),
and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine
examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas
Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on
lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the
native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and
the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The
foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic
subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for
the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive
to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing
and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral
sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This
necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of
pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593),
England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
