ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Part of the materials used in this block is drawn from self-learning materials developed by IGNOU, New Delhi and few other Open Education Resources duly acknowledge in the reference section at the end of the unit. BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONOURS) IN ENGLISH (BAEG) BEG-2 British Poetry and Drama: 17th And 18th Centuries BLOCK-1 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE 17TH & 18TH CENTURY UNIT 1 17TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE UNIT 2 18TH CENTURY LITERATURE UNIT 1 17TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE STRUCTURE 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Jacobean Period 1.2.1 Jacobean Society 1.2.2 King James as the King of England 1.2.3 Arts and Architecture during the Jacobean Era 1.2.4 Gun-Powder Plot 1.2.5 Royal Finances 1.2.6 A Few Famous Writers of the Jacobean Era 1.3 Metaphysical Poetry 1.3.1 Origin of the name 1.3.2 20th Century Recognition 1.3.3 Defining the Canon 1.3.4 A Sense of Community 1.3.5 Elegists 1.3.6 Free From Former Artificial Styles 1.3.7 European Baroque influences, including the use of Conceits 1.3.8 Wordplay and Wit 1.3.9 Platonic Influence 1.3.10 Stylistic Echoes 1.3.11 The Augustans 1.4 Cavalier Poetry 1.5 Comedy of Humours 1.6 Masques and Beast Fables 1.7 Glossary of Difficult Terms 1.8 Exercises 1.9 Let Us Sum Up 1.0 OBJECTIVES The prime objective of the following Block is to brief the students and enhance their knowledge on 17th and 18th Century Literature. A lot of Political, Historical, Social and Economic changes have taken place during these two major centuries. It wonřt be 1 wrong if we say that these two centuries were responsible in offering a myriad of Literary Gems to the world, be it Edmund Spenser or Ben Jonson or William Shakespeare. A lot of renounced literary movements have also taken in between these two centuries. The Learners are also going to get an insight on the Art and Literature, Styles and Evolvement of each of the centuries. There is always a backdrop that acts as a catalyst to the plays, poems and narrations written by the then writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. 1.1 INTRODUCTION Naturalizing the Italian Romantic Epic with the utmost ease and effortlessness was Spenser’s forte that was difficult to match with. Spenser breathed in the honest temper of Reformation and turned to be a delight during the early Renaissance. His ideas were softened by Italian Platonism or Neo-Platonismas well as the spirit of intense patriotism which animated Englishmen in the year of the Spanish Armada. To harmonise such diverse elements was a difficult task, and, even before Spenser's death, had been rendered impossible by the course of English religious and political history as impossible as it was after the American war to preserve the early Whig identification of the cause of Britain with the cause of political liberty. Religious persecution made it difficult for the Puritan to identify his zeal for England with his zeal for Protestantism. At the same time, the essentially pagan spirit of the Italian Renaissance was not easily exorcised even by Spenser, and the emancipated artistic-enthusiasm which created the Elizabethan drama, poems such as Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, and the sonnets of Shakespeare, was to the stern spirit of Puritanism simply anathema. Before the sixteenth century ended poets were beginning to form different schools, or else the two strains, the secular and the religious, run side by side in a single poet's work without his endeavouring to reconcile them in any way. This tendency was accentuated in the early seventeenth century. This chapter deals with distinct groups or schools of poets. The patriotic note of Spenser and Shakespeare is heard only from belated Elizabethans as Drayton and Chapman. The Protestant religious poets form a group by themselves; the Catholic Anglicans another. The courtly poets, whether religious or secular, are out of touch with the nation at large, their poetry a delicate exotic. One poet, indeed, emerges with the power that genius gives to harmonise diverse elements. Milton, like Spenser, unites the spirit of the Renaissance with that of the Reformation, and both with patriotism. But he does so only by narrowing though intensifying each, by sacrificing some of the finest elements in the noblest Elizabethan conceptions of beauty, goodness, and country. Milton's ideal of art becomes strictly, even pedantically, classical; his Protestantism is less ethical than Spenser's, and more theological; his patriotism tends to include only those Englishmen who form the chosen people of God. Of the Elizabethan poets who continued to produce fresh and interesting poetry in the reign of James, Chapman. If we set aside Donne and Jonson as the fountain-heads of Jacobean and Caroline poetry, the two most important, Daniel and Drayton, have 2 been included in the volume on The Later Renaissance. One veteran and rugged Elizabethan, however, deserves a word as poet as well as dramatist. Chapman's earliest volume of poems, The Shadow of Night, containing the pedantic and obscure Hymnus in Noctem and Hymnus in Cynthiam, appeared in 1594; his Ovid's Banquet of Senseŕa characteristic contribution to the Venus and Adonis class of poemŕwith The Amorous Zodiacŕa translation from the Frenchŕin 1595; and his completion of Marlowe's Hero and Leander in 1598. His great work, the translation of Homer, was begun some time before 1598, when Seaven Bookes of the Iliad’s of Homer, Prince of Poets, appeared with a dedication to the Earl of Essex. The complete Iliad appeared in 1611; the complete Odyssey in 1614; The Whole Works of Homer in 1616. The Battle of the Frogs was added later, as well as the Hymns. Chapman comes at the head of a chapter on seventeenth-century poetry as a useful reminder that "fantastic" is not a very distinctive title to apply to the poetry of Donne and his followers,ŕthat if conceit and far-fetched similitudes are a sign of decadence, then Elizabethan poetry was born decadent, for from first to last it is, in Arnold's phrase, "steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips." Whether we consider Chapman's original poems or his translations, his obscure, pedantic, harsh, yet always ardent and fitfully splendid hymns and complimentary verses, or the Homer which Keats has immortalised, it would be difficult to conceive a poet who, despite his classics, his eulogies of learning, and his friendship for Jonson, is more essentially "Gothic" as Addison and Thomson used the word. It is a tribute to the genius of Homer that there was so much in the Iliad and Odyssey which Chapman could translate well, or even greatly. He is at his best, it seems to me, when describing the rush of fighting, and for this, as well as other reasons, his Iliad is better than his Odyssey; but when full justice has been done to the animation of his style, its entire freedom from otiose filling-out, itřs not infrequent felicity and splendour of phrase, the last word on the inadequacy of Chapman's colloquialisms and conceits to reproduce the dignity and simplicity of Homer has been spoken by Matthew Arnold.[2] It is difficult, in the absence of such contemporary evidence as is afforded to-day by critical reviews, to date exactly the changes in poetical taste. It seems The Spenserians. Clear, however, that in the closing years of the sixteenth century there was a reaction against the diffuse, flamboyant, Italianate poetry which Spenser, Sidney, and Lodge had made fashionable,ŕa reaction which showed itself in the satires of Hall and Marston, but found its fullest expression in the poetryŕmuch of which is satiricalŕof Donne and of Jonson, who took the place in courtly circles which had been held earlier by Spenser and Sidney. The Spenserians of the early seventeenth centuryŕbetween whom and Spenser in pastoral poetry Drayton forms an important linkŕwere not courtly poets. Though they look towards the court on occasions, they stand outside its circle. They belong to the Protestant wing of the Anglican Church; and in the somewhat bourgeois and didactic tone of their poetry, their taste for emblems, and the natural, artless tone in which they speak of themselves, resemble the Dutch poets of the same class. 3 The most thorough-going disciples of Spenser among these serious young poets of the reign of James I. were the Cambridge divines and poets Phineas (1582-1648) and Giles (1583-1623) Fletcher, the sons of Giles Fletcher, author of Licia, and cousins of the dramatist. They were both FellowsŕPhineas of King's, Giles of Trinity Collegeŕ and both took orders. Giles, after being reader in Greek at Cambridge, became rector of Alderton in Suffolk, and Phineas, after some vicissitudes of fortune, was appointed rector of Hilgay in Norfolk. In Phineas Fletcher's poetry there were apparently the two distinct strains of which we have spoken above. Phineas Fletcher. His Sicelides, a comedy performed before James in 1614, mingles pastoral love-story with comic scenes not devoid of coarseness; and Grosart conjectured that he was the author of Britain's Ida (1627), a frank and voluptuous Ovidian idyll. On the other hand, the Spenserian pastorals and allegories which he published in 1627 and 1633ŕdescribing them as "these raw essays of my very unripe years and almost childhood"ŕare without exception religious, and so was all his subsequent work in verse and prose. The Locustævel Pietas Jesuitica: The Locusts or Appolyonists is a strange poemŕthe first part in Latin, the second in Englishŕdescribing allegorically the rise of the Jesuits and the Gunpowder Plot.