英国文学史及选读复习9 summary of the Elizabethan age II

Summary of the Age of Elizabeth (II)

1.Shakespeare’s successors.

a.Ben Jonson 1573?—1637

His life: son of an educated gentleman who was thrown into prison by Queen Mary, whose property was confiscated. From his mother he received certain strong characteristics. His father died before he was born. His mother married a bricklayer. He may have studied in Cambridge for a short time, but his stepfather soon sent him to learn the bricklayer’s trade. He ran away from this, and went with the English army to fight Spaniards in the Low Countries. There he fought a duel with one of the enemy’s soldiers. He killed the man. Then he became an actor and reviser of old plays. He killed an actor in a duel and only escaped hanging by pleading “benefit of clergy”, but he lost all his poor goods and was branded for life on his left thumb. Jonson’s masques won him royal favor, was made poet laureate.

With his great learning, ability and commanding position as poet laureate, he set himself squarely against his contemporaries and the romantic tendency of the age. He fought bravely for two things---- to restore the classic form of the drama and to keep the stage from its downward course. Apparently he failed. Nevertheless his influence lived and grew more powerful till, aided largely by French influence, it resulted in the so-called classicism of the eighteenth century.

His work is in strong contrast with that of Shakespeare. Alone he fought against the romantic tendency of the age, and to restore the classic standards. Thus the whole action of his drama usually covers only a few hours, or a single day. He never takes liberties with historical facts, as Shakespeare does, but is accurate to the smallest detail. His dramas abound in classical learning, are carefully and logically constructed, and comedy and tragedy are kept apart, instead of crowding each other as they do in Shakespeare and in life. In one respect his comedies are worthy of careful reading, --- they are intensely realistic, presenting men and women of the time exactly as they were. From a few of Jonson’s scenes we can understand---better than from all the plays of Shakespeare---how men talked and acted during the Age of Elizabeth.

His works:

His first comedy: Every Man in His Humor is a key to all his dramas. The word “hu mo r” in his age stood for some characteristic whim or quality of society. He gives to his leading character some prominent humor, exaggerates it, as the cartoonist enlarges the most characteristic feature of a face, and so holds it before our attention that all other qualities are lost sight of. It is the first of three satires. Its special aim was to ridicule the humors of the city. The second, Cynthia’s Revels, satirizes the humors of the court; while the third, The Poetaster, the result of a quarrel with his contemporaries, was leveled at the false standards of the poets of the age.

Three best known comedies: V olpone= The Fox The Alchemist , The Silent Woman

V olpone is a merciless analysis of a man governed by love of money. Alchemist is a study of quackery on one side and of gullibility on the other, founded on

the medieval idea of the philosopher’s stone. The Silent Woman is a

prose comedy abounding in fun and unexpected situations.

His tragedies: Sejanus Catiline

His masques: The Satyr Masque of Blackness Masque of Beauty etc. masque: courtly form of dramatic spectacle popular in 17th-cent. England.

Characterized by the use of masks and mingling of actors and spectators,

it employed pastoral and mythological themes, with an emphasis on

music and dance. The foremost writer of masques was Ben Jonson.

b.John Webster 1580?—1634

His extraordinary powers of expression rank him with Shakespeare; but his talent seems to have been largely devoted to the blood-and-thunder play begun by Marlowe. His two best known plays are The White Devil, (1612) The Duchess of Malfi (1623).

c.Thomas Middleton 1570?--- 1627

best known by two plays.

The Changeling tragicomedy Women Beware Women tragedy

d.Thomas Heywood 1580?—1650?

Wrote for market, 220 plays. Good work was impossible if one writes for market. His best: A woman Killed with Kindness , The Fair Maid of the West

e.Thomas Dekker 1570---?

His works show happy and sunny nature, pleasant and good to meet. The Shoemakers’ Holiday , a humorous study of plain working people.

2.The prose writers

a.Francis Bacon 1561—1626

The most notable prose writer of the Elizabethan period.

His life: In him we see one of those complex and contradictory natures which are the despair of the biographer. If the writer be an admirer of Bacon, he finds too much that he must excuse or pass over in silence; and if he takes his stand on the law to condemn the avarice and dishonesty of his subject, he finds enough moral courage and nobility to make him question the justice of his own judgment. Ben Jonson thought highly of him, but Hallam not. On one side he is the politician, cold, calculating, selfish, and on the other the literary and scientific man with an impressive devotion to truth for its own great sake; here a man using questionable means to advance his own interests, and there a man seeking with zeal and endless labor to penetrate the secret ways of nature. Bacon was apparently one of those double natures that only God is competent to judge, because of the strange mixture of intellectual strength and moral weakness that is in them.

He was son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seal, and learned Ann Cook, sister-in-law to Lord Burleigh, greatest of the queen’s statesmen. At 12 he went to Cambridge, but left it after two years, declaring the whole plan of education to be radically wrong, and the system of Aristotle to be a childish delusion. Next year, in order to continue his education he accompanied the English ambassador to France,

where he studied statistics and diplomacy. He then took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1582. He wrote the tract “On the Greatest Birth of Time” which was a plea for his inductive system of philosophy, reasoning from many facts to one law, rather than from an assumed law to particular facts, which was the deductive method. In his famous plea for progress he demanded three things: the free investigation of nature, the discovery of facts instead of theories, the verification of results by experiments rather than by argument. In our day these are the A,B,C of science, but in Bacon’s time they seemed revolutionary. He devoted himself to Essex, the young and dangerous favorite of the queen, won his friendship, and then used him skillfully to better his own position. When the earl was tried for treason it was partly through Bacon’s efforts that he was convicted and beheaded. During Elizabeth’s reign Bacon had sought repeatedly for high office, but had been blocked by Burleigh and perhaps also by the queen’s own shrewdness in judging men.With the advent of James I (1603) he devoted himself to the new ruler and rose rapidly in favor. He was knighted and soon afterwards married a rich wife. In 1613 he was made attorney-general, and speedily made enemies by using the office to increase his p ersonal ends. In 1617 he was appointed to his father’s office, Lord Keeper of the Seal, and next year to the high office of Lord Chancellor. When Parliament assembled in 1621, Bacon was accused of accepting bribes, political corruption. He was deprived of office, sentenced to pay the fine of 40,000 pounds, to be imprisoned. Though the imprisonment lasted only a few days and the fine was largely remitted, his hopes and schemes for political honors were ended. In the spring of 1626, while driving in a snowstorm, it occurred to him that snow might be used as a preservative instead of salt. He stopped at the first house, bought a fowl, and proceeded to test his theory. The experiment chilled him, and he died soon after from the effects of his exposure.

His works: Instauratio Magna (Latin) = The Great Institution of True Philosophy, but he completed only two parts: Advancement of Learning (1605); Novum Organum (1620, Latin)= New Instrument. The object was to bring practical results to all the people.

Essays (English), marvelous, terse, pithy, packed with thought.

The New Atlantis is a kind of scientific novel describing another Utopia as seen by Bacon.

His place and work

One can’t read his works without becoming conscious of two things, --- a perennial freshness, and an intellectual power which marks him as one of the great minds of the world.

In an age when men were busy with romance and philosophy, he insisted that the first object of education is to make a man familiar with his natural environment; from books he turned to men; from theory to fact, from philosophy to nature,--- and that is perhaps his greatest contribution to life and literature.

b.Sir Walter Raleigh 1552?---1618

His life is an almost incomprehensible mixture of the poet, scholar, and adventurer; now leading an expedition into the unmapped wilds of the New World, capturing the gold-laden Spanish galleons and now writing history and poetry. He is the restless spirits of the Elizabethan Age personified. His chief prose works are: Discovery of Guiana, History of the World.

“O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the star-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!”

c.Thomas North 1535?---1601?

Translator of The Parallel Lives by Plutarch A.D. 46?—c. 120, Greek essayist and biographer. The Parallel Lives are biographies of Greeks and Romans. North’s translation (1579) profoundly affected English literature, e.g., supplying the material for Sh akespeare’s Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra