Letteratura Inglese 2 Humanism

Shakespeare turns this tradition upside down and his sonnets are different from the other compositions of the time:

most of them are not addressed to a woman, but to a man; those who are addressed to a woman refer to a dark and

infernal lady; both of them have no name; some of the sonnets don’t flirt with the man, but invite him to marry and

procreate. The main themes are procreation and art, both seen as a way to defeat death. The form is the typical

English sonnet fixed by Surrey, 3 quatrains and 1 couplet, but the structure of the content actually generates an

octave and a sestet, which contain a topic and its contrast. The language is varied, from business to theology, from

botanic to navigation, all mixed in a new language, rich in neologisms for the English language.

The reign of James I

We can notice the passage from the reign of Elizabeth to the reign of James I in many of Shakespeare’s dramas,

especially in the references to the Scottish origin of Macbeth and with the different political and philosophical aim of

the last dramas. Theater was very dependent from monarchy and James changed the name of Shakespeare’s

company from Chamberlain’s Men to King’s Men, and elected and patronized it as his favorite company. The reign of

James I meant the union of the crown of England with the crown of Scotland, as he was the king of Scotland before:

in fact James was crowned as king of Great Britain. His balanced international politics gave him the name of rex

pacificus, but the consequent drop in patriotism generated a drop in popularity. James was an obstinate persecutor

of witchcraft, and we have reference to this particular in Macbeth. But his court was too splendid and expensive and

he increased anti-monarchic tendencies.

Benjamin Jonson

Benjamin Jonson was born in 1572 and is considered the first English author to consider himself an author, and to

defend the profession of the poet. He wrote comedies and tragedies for the public theater, and is considered the

second most important play-writer of the age after Shakespeare. His typical style is called comedy of humors,

especially in his plays Every Man in His Humor, Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair: this style analyzes the

man as a balanced mix of 4 humors, related to the 4 elements of universe, presenting people who are fully

determined by one of these humors. In The Alchemist the protagonists are two fake alchemists who cheat their

hopeful customers; Volpone is a conner who pretends to be dying to cheat on people who would like to become his

heirs. So there are two categories of characters in Jonson, cheaters and cheated, with a sympathy for the first ones.

About poetry, his model is the balance of Horace and his celebrative relationship with the emperor/king, so the aim

of his poetry is the court. The way in the middle between his dramas and his poetry are masques, a kind of show

played at the court with a celebrative intent; Jonson wrote around 30 masques. In his In The Works of Benjamin

Jonson he describes his work and how to read it.

Comedy and tragedy besides Shakespeare

Beside Shakespeare, comedies didn’t have a romantic plot and were mostly tragi-comedies. Tragedy followed 3

paths, the first one shifting the paradigm from powerful people to middle-class, mainly dealing with the most

clamorous murders of that time, in the so called murder play; the second one set at the court, with complex plots

and several protagonists instead of a main one; the third way was the revenge tragedy, symbolized by The Spanish

Tragedy by Kyd and The Revenger’s Tragedy by Middleton, in which a protagonist seeks revenge for an unpunished

crime.

John Webster

John Webster set two tragedies in Italy, in a catholic and Machiavellian environment: Italy was a perfect setting to

deal with political and religious jeopardizing contents, because her catholic courts were considered a symbol of

Machiavellianism and cynicism. The Duchess of Malfi, of 1613, is considered the masterpiece of all Jacobean

tragedies, and deals with a story adapted from a real fact, about a virtuous Duchess who secretly marries her honest

butler Antonio, provoking the rage of her brothers and ending with her imprisonment and death. The White Devil, of

1609, is a patchwork of cues from tragedies of Shakespeare and of other play-writers of the time; the plot does not

identify a heroin like in The Duchess of Malfi, and the personalities of the characters are very complicated. It deals

with the trial of a noble Venetian who murdered her husband in order to continue an adulterine relation: the

protagonist of the trial is the speech of a cardinal who concentrates on her lavish figure more than on the murder.

Late Jacobean and Caroline period

The late period of Jacobean tragedy became full of funeral and metaphoric contents and English drama was less and

less interesting. During the Caroline era two play-writers wrote interesting dramas: John Ford, with a sweetening of

the turbulent language of the previous period but similar contents to those of the Jacobean period and especially as

in Webster; and James Shirley, whose dramas reveal hints about the closing of the theaters from 1642 to 1660.

History of the XVII c.

Charles I became king in 1625. Because of his absolutist views and because of his affinity with Catholicism, both

landowners and middle-class opposed him. The puritan coalition was managed by Oliver Cromwell, who led the

victory of the parliamentarian army against the king’s troops. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and a republic was

declared, but the appointment of Cromwell as the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1653 lead to a new

dictatorship. After Cromwell there was no opposition to a monarchic restoration, so in 1660 Charles II was crowned

and contrasted the Parliament just like his father did. In 1685 his brother James II succeeded and promoted the

same politics. In 1688, with the Glorious Revolution, the Parliament deposed the king and crowned his daughter

Mary and her husband William of Orange, both protestant. They took an oath over a Bill of Rights, and England

became a constitutional monarchy. The Parliament was divided into the liberal Wighs and the conservative Tories.

The English aristocratic culture was coming to an end: the middle-class was becoming the new protagonist of history.

Poetry during the Jacobean and the Caroline period

During the first half of the XVII c. poetry was divided into two main tendencies: Cavalier and Metaphysical. The

Cavalier tendency was led by Ben Jonson and was characterized by balance and metric perfection, on the classic

model. The Metaphysical tendency was led by John Donne and was characterized by stylistic wit and the use of the

conceit, a deep metaphor concerning a long passage or the entire poem.

John Donne is famous for his collection Songs and Sonnets: differently from Elizabethan sonnets, his collection

doesn’t imitate Petrarchan conventions and themes anymore. A centered unique woman figure is absent, and also

the subject is pluralized; the meter is not homogeneous within the collection and each poetry has its own unique

characteristics. In fact, the main theme of the collection is plurality; the only centralized thing is the experience of

love. Donne also wrote elegies and satires: his satires are characterized by a social pessimism that becomes stronger

in the two poems Anniversaries, dedicated to a noble girl died in her youth. The later Donne acquires a mystic style,

with the Divine Poems, about the paradoxical experience of Christian’s lives. The theme of the Holy Sonnets is the

relationship of a Christian with an unreachable God. The young and libertine Jack Donne will become the preacher

Dr. Donne. This passage can also be noticed along the unrolling of the Songs and Sonnets.

Another poet who dealt with the mystical themes of the last Donne was George Herbert, for whom the human body

is God’s temple, and poetry is a manifestation of the divine presence on Earth and men must seek an interaction

between body and soul; his view were gathered in the collection The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.

In metric Herbert was closer to the Elizabethan poetry, differently from Donne.

Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell lived in the XVII c. and wrote poetries during the protectorate of Cromwell and the Restoration. His

poetry is characterized by a strong ambiguity, both in contents and in political views, probably because of the

alternation of power during his life. During the protectorate, he wrote the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return

from Ireland; on the other hand, his late satires represent a consensus to the monarchy of Charles II. His ambiguity is

not just diachronic, it is also present in each single poetry, presenting several themes and antithesis and a

polyphonic subject, and a unitary interpretation is impossible. Eyes and Tears is Baroque meditation, with Baroque

themes and images as the tears and the crying Magdalen; the language is oxymoronic, with a structure based on

expansion and concentration of a central theme.

John Milton

John Milton was born in 1608 and is considered the most important figure in English literature after Shakespeare. He

graduated at Cambridge, where he wrote his first poetries in Italian, English and Latin. His literature is characterized

by the voluntary twisting of traditional genres and styles; the first case in which this twisting appears is the bucolic

elegy Lycidas, of 1637, which was published in the collection Poems of 1645. Poems contains also two twin poetries,

L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, that show two possible different attitudes with which the lyric subject can face the

material world: in Il Penseroso the poet assumes an attitude that is contemplative, silent and isolated from society,

in communion with nature, ending in harmony and ecstasy with the world and the divine; in L’Allegro the attitude is

not opposite as one would expect, it’s still an ethical research, but it is reached through a controlled and balanced

hedonism, through the pleasure of a landscape or the delight of the observation of human activities, through the

memory of happy celebrations. The difference between the two is the similarity of L’Allegro to a classic Epicureanis

and the theological and sublime sense of experience of Il Penseroso. An important masque in which Milton starts the

demonization of the aristocratic culture is Comus, of 1634: the character of Comus represents dissoluteness and

eroticism and continuously tries to seduce the young Lady with his rhetoric of carpe diem, but the girl resists thanks

to her rhetoric of Protestant moral. The work in which Milton definitely demonizes the aristocratic culture is one of

the greatest heroic poems in English literature: Paradise Lost, published in 12 books in 1667. The metric form is the

blank verse, typical of Elizabethan drama and in contrast with the former epic models, linking Milton to the puritan

austerity of Homeric and Virgilian tradition. The plot also contrasts the idea of epic, a genre that traditionally

celebrates a victory, while Paradise Lost is based on the utmost defeat, recalling the structure of the Elizabethan

tragedy, and if we consider Satan as the protagonist of