Prose styles, 1550–1600
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-
century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and
imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin
writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the
expense of “soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly
high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as
tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–
1600), a massive collection of travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives.
William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s
excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot’s anecdotal
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his morris dance from London to
Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary;
the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the
expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader
by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and
the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master
F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in
English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising authenticity and almost
psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories
imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George
Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care “to displease twenty men to please one woman,”
believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich
(1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for
many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly’s
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580),
set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot
of Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates,
letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and
displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style would be successful on the stage, but in
fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s,
Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney
rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of
Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel
Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned
controversies of the 1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the
controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by
Elizabeth’s more godly subjects, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose.
Hooker’s is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly re-
creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to
modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto
his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was
deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of
1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical scurrility
and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical
gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the
consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers
Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s
Lenten Stuff (1599), the latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal vein” makes
fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is
probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he makes even Greene’s
low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look
conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle
Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of
the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.
Deloney’s entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theater in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
Theater and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theater was the focal point of the age. Public
life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the
drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the
playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, laborers, and the like, but the same
play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by
night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event
resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theater was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of
nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by
the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of
Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically
accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic
prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the
first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theaters
more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theaters were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They
inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and
the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to
reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse,
associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine
example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy
based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other
hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the
provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show,
pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor
interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy
villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any
moment to step beyond the play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The
intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553)
and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid
with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of
energetic spectacle and comedy.
Design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of AuguresDetail of a design by
Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire
Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across
Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes
of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related
to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), translated from a
reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive
court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and
changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The
principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.
