2. I. MAJOR FEATURES
❖ The reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603. Therefore, the
second half of the 16th century bear her name, the Elizabethan Age.
❖ The mere survival of Elizabeth for so long provided the opportunity for nationalistic
consciousness to become firmly established. The English rallied to their queen, and she
become a symbol of Englishness and nationalism.
❖ Before Elizabeth’s time, the universities were mainly devoted to educating the clergy, and
that remained an important part of their function. But, in the second half of the century the
sons of the gentry and the aristocracy were going in increasing numbers to the universities.
Their residence in these places was simply an educational preparation for public service or
managing their estates.
❖ Literature was regarded as an adjunct activity, not a primary occupation, and there were
comparatively few readers, purchasers, and publishers of books.
❖ Elizabethan writers of higher rank, like Sir Philip Sidney, thought of themselves as courtiers,
statesmen, landowners; they considered poetry a social grace and a courtly pastime.
❖ Writer of lower rank sought careers as civil servants, secretaries, tutors, and divines; they
might take up more or less permanent residence in a noble household, or, more casually, they
might offer their literary work to actual or prospective patrons1 , amid lavish praises, in the
hope of support, career advancement, or financial reward.
❖ However, some Elizabethan patrons were well-educated humanists motivated by genuine
literary interests, and with them, patronage extended beyond financial support to the creation
of literary and intellectual circles.
❖ Almost every writer of the period got in some sort of trouble (political, copyright) for
publishing a book. It might be prison, it might be merely a reprimand, or it might be an
investigation.
❖ The standards and tastes of the middle class affected all publishing and literary success.
They liked books of instruction, romances, religious tracts, conduct books for men and
women, and sensational ballads.
1 a person who gives financial or other support to a person, organization, cause, or activity.
3. II. POETIC FORMS
The Elizabethan poets of lofty ambition, like Spenser and Milton, consciously followed the
course of poetic development set by Virgil, beginning with pastoral and rising to epic.
1. The conventions 2 of the pastoral mode present a simple and idealized world inhabited by
shepherds and shepherdesses who are chiefly concerned to tend their flock, fall in love,
engage in a friendly poetry contest. The conventions of the pastoral mode could be
assimilated to several different genres. Pastoral song commonly expressed the joys of the
shepherd’s life, or disappointment in love. Pastoral eclogues were dialogues between
shepherds. There were also pastoral funeral elegies, pastoral dramas, pastoral
romances, and even pastoral episodes within epics.
2. Poems in the satirical mode were also placed among the “low” kinds, plain in matter and
style.
3. Poems in the lyric mode were comparatively brief, and usually concerned with praises of
various kinds, with love in its various moods, or with celebration of nature, the good life, or
other such matters. The noblest lyric genres were thought to be hymns (praises of God or
the gods) and odes (celebrating worthy men and women, and notable occasions); such
poems were conventionally exalted in tone, elevated in language, charged with feeling; they
often had complex stanzaic patterns and frequent apostrophes. An important variety of ode
in the sixteenth century was the epithalamium, a poem in praise of marriage. There were
also many varieties of song, written to fixed formal specification. A most important lyric
genre in the sixteenth century was the sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet sequence is a series
of fourteen-line sonnets (with songs interspersed) exploring the contrary states of feeling
lover experiences as he desires and idolizes an unattainable lady: some conventional
themes concern the lady’s great beauty, her power over him, her cruelty to him, his
sleeplessness, the fire of his love and the ice of her chastity, the pain of absence, the
renunciation of love, the eternity and originality of his poems. The chiefly purposes of the
love sonneteers sought to celebrate the dignity and power of love by elaborate rhetorical
and stylistic devices available in the Petrarchan tradition. All love sonnets were not
Petrarchan, nor were all sonnets, or sonnet sequences, devoted to love: some sequences
treated religious devotion, and occasional sonnets might address a wide variety of topics.
2 literary conventions are patterns that have become habitual, and arouse certain expectations in the reader.
4. 4. There were also poems in the tragic mode. A principal genre was the complaint, the
chief convention of it is that the ghost of someone who fell from high place bemoans his
fate and warns others; the warning carries a moral lesson. A related kind of poem is the
heroical epistles, in which the complaint is written as a letter, usually by a wronged
woman to the man who abandoned or betrayed her.
5. Another set of conventions defined a mythological-erotic mode. And in the late
sixteenth century the Ovidian erotic mode was revived: it values and conventions of lush
and elaborate descriptions of physical beauty, of delight in the pleasures of the senses, and
of frank eroticism appealed to a courtly taste. In this vein were several poems in the genre
of the epyllion, a short mythological narrative.
6. Finally, there was the heroic mode, with its values of honor, battle courage, loyalty,
leadership, endurance, glorification of nation or people. The chief genre was the epic,
conventionally a long, exalted poem in the high style, based on a heroic story from the
nation’s distant history and imitating Homer and Virgil in structure and specific topics.
5. III.MAJOR THEMES AND TECHNIQUES
❖ A decisive shift of taste toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace
and sophistication was announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney.
❖The Elizabethan recognized that nature is the basis of art, but had no uneasiness about a
possible conflict between art and nature. The term “artificial” had for them good rather than
dubious meanings, referring to the proper use of human ingenuity to enhance nature, to
enable it to outdo itself.
❖ Another vital principal of Elizabethan aesthetics was concern with models3 , with
conventions, with literary tradition as the very vehicle for artistic expression.
❖ Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is the only major work of literary criticism in sixteenth century,
heavily influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics.
❖ There was a spirit of joy and gaiety, of innocence and lightheartedness, which welds the
love of English for their countryside to the mood of pastoral-quiet contentment and reflective
leisure.
❖ The Elizabethan also manifest the opposite mood: the burning desire for conquest, for
achievement, for surmounting all obstacles, which are themes to the heroic mode.
❖ Also, The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century.
❖ In order to catch up with Continental developments in arts and philosophy. The Tudors
needed to create a class of educated diplomats, statesmen, and officials and to dignify their
court by making it a fount of cultural as well as political patronage. The new learning, widely
disseminated through the Erasmian4 educational programs of such men as John Colet and
Sir Thomas Elyot, proposed to use a systematic schooling in Latin authors and some Greek
to encourage in the social elites a flexibility of mind and civilized serviceableness that would
allow enlightened princely government to walk hand in hand with responsible scholarship.
And this new learning create a great influence of the Greek mythology on the English
literature.
❖ Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one that is not
still anthologized today.
3 The chief models were Homer and Virgil for epic, Theocritus and Virgil for pastoral, Cicero for rhetoric and
prose style, Plautus and Terence for comedy, Seneca for tragedy, Petrarch for the sonnet, Ariosto and Tasso
for the romantic epic, Ovid for love poetry and erotic mythological narratives.
4 after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus
6. ❖ He was born in Kent, England.
❖ He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland
and Lady Mary Dudley.
❖ After private tutelage, Philip Sidney entered Shrewsbury School at
the age of ten in 1564. After attending Christ Church, Oxford,
(1568-1571) he left without taking a degree in order to complete his
education by travelling the continent. Among the places he visited
were Paris, Frankfurt, Venice, and Vienna.
❖ Sidney married Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis
Walsingham, in 1583. The Sidneys had one daughter, Elizabeth, later
Countess of Rutland.
❖ Upon his return to England in 1575, Sidney attended the court of
Elizabeth I, and was considered "the flower of chivalry." He was also
IV. OUTSTANDING FIGURES AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION
a patron of the arts, actively encouraging such authors as Edward
Dyer,Greville, and most importantly, the young poet Edmund
Spenser, who dedicated The Shepherd's Calendar to him.
1. Sir Philip Sidney (1554 - 1586)
❖ At some uncertain date, he composed a major piece of critical
prose that was published after his death under the two titles, The
Defence of Poesy and An Apology for Poetry. Sidney’s engaging
tract is highly eclectic, drawing together aesthetic precepts from
several traditions and underscoring those which are of primary
importance to the Elizabethan: ideal imitation, moral teaching,
decorum. Sidney also makes large claims for the didactic role
poetry: he invokes Horace’s formula that poetry teaches by
delighting, but (staunch Protestant that he is) he emphasizes even
more its rhetorical power to move us to be virtuous. He also
highlights the importance of suiting subject to genre and style.
❖ In 1586 Sidney, along with his younger brother Robert Sidney,
another poet in this family of poets, took part in a skirmish against
the Spanish at Zutphen, and was wounded of a musket shot that
shattered his thigh-bone. According to the story, while lying
wounded he gave his water-bottle to another wounded soldier,
saying, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine". Some twenty-two
days later Sidney died of the unhealed wound at not yet thirty-two
years of age. His death occasioned much mourning in England as
the Queen and her subjects grieved for the man who had come to
exemplify the ideal courtier. It is said that Londoners, come out to
see the funeral progression, cried out "Farewell, the worthiest knight
that lived."
7. FORM
Astrophil and Stella 5 39 6 Rhyme scheme: abab abab cddc ee
1.Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace, Sonnet: Petrarchan, octave + sestet
2.The baiting place of wit 7, the balm of woe, Meter: iambic pentameter
3.The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, Scan: Come sleep/ O sleep/ the cer/tain
knot/ of peace
4.Th’indifferent judge between the high and low;
Theme: sleep as a savior from the pain of
5.With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
love, reason vs. love.
6.Of those fierce darts, despair at me doth throw:
Title: the title is paradox. Astrophil: derives
7.Oh make in me those civil wars to cease; from the Greek word for star. Stella derives
from the Latin word for star, and it’s name
8.I will good tribute pay if thou do so. of a woman which is rarely mentioned in
that time. The title is apt, for the sonnets
9.Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed, center on a man who loves a shining
beauty. She is the star that illuminates his
10.A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light: life.
11.A rosy garland, and a weary head: Tone: Sad, melancholic, tone of
complaining , despair and disappointment.
12.And if these things, as being thine by right,
The importance of Astophil and Stella:
13.Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, 1. it’s the 1st English sonnet sequence
containing 108 Petrarchan sonnets.
14.Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see8. 2. influenced Shakespeare who perfected
this type of sonnets.
3. it reflects the human psychology.
CONTENT
5 Sidney's Astrophil and Stella ("Starlover and Star") was begun probably around 1576, during his courtship
with Penelope Devereux. Astrophil and Stella, which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in the
long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. Most of the sonnets are influenced by Petrarchan conventions — the
abject lover laments the coldness of his beloved lady towards him, even though he is so true of love and her
neglect causes him so much anguish. Lady Penelope was married to Lord Rich in 1581.
6 Aim: Sidney personifies sleep and begins to have a conversation with it. He prays that Sleep will come and
release him from his current misery. Only when he is asleep is he able to ease his suffering and stem the
civil war that is waging between his heart and his head, between his love and his reason. He wonders what
price he must pay in order to convince the god of Sleep to come to him, and he promises a "good tribute."
Smooth pillows, a comfortable bed, and a dark, quiet room are all that he desires, if only he can persuade
Sleep to come. Finally, Sidney comes up with a way to convince Sleep to come to him. When he is asleep,
he argues, the image of Stella will appear in his dreams, and Sleep will be able to watch. This is the greatest
tribute that he can pay.
7In the 108 sonnets of the sequence, Sidney uses forms of the word "wit" 42 times. Historically, the term wit
meant "to know." In Philip Sidney's time, wit referred to mental ability and intelligence.
8 The irony in this sonnet is very interesting. Sidney begs for Sleep to come and rescue him from his love
and suffering for Stella. Yet, at the same time, an image of Stella will automatically come to his head while he
is asleep. Whether he is asleep or awake, Stella is always in his mind. He prefers the Stella in his dreams
because he does not have to face the reality that she is not his own.
8. ❖ He was born in East Smithfield, London.
❖ He was from a common family, and as a young boy, he was
educated in London at the Merchant Taylors’ School and
matriculated as a sizer at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
❖ The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of
earlier works such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer
and II Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, whom Spenser greatly
admired.
❖Spenser used a distinctive verse form, called the Spenserian
stanza, in several works, including The Faerie Queene. The
stanza's main meter is iambic pentameter with a final line in
iambic hexameter (having six feet or stresses, known as an
Alexandrine), and the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. It is similar to
IV. OUTSTANDING FIGURES AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION
the Shakespearean sonnet in the sense that its set up is based
2. Edmund Spenser (1552 - 1599)
more on the 3 quatrains and a couplet, a system set up by
Shakespeare; however it is more like the Petrarchan tradition in
the fact that the conclusion follows from the argument or issue
set up in the earlier quatrains.
❖ Spenser's Epithalamion is the most admired of its type in the
English language. It was written for his wedding to his young
bride, Elizabeth Boyle. The poem consists of 365 long lines,
corresponding to the days of the year; 68 short lines, representing
the sum of the 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the
annual cycle; and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and
sidereal hours.
❖ Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use
print to advertise his talents.
❖ Spenser was called a Poet's Poet and was admired by many
poets.
❖ Spenser died in London in distressed circumstances (according
to legend), aged forty-six. It was arranged for his coffin to be
carried by other poets, upon which they threw many pens and
pieces of poetry into his grave with many tears.
9. FORM
AMORETTI 9, SONNET 75 10
Rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee
1.One day I wrote her name upon the strand, Sonnet: Petrarchan, 3 quatrains + 1 couplet
2.But came the waves and washed it away 11: Meter: iambic pentameter
3.Again I write it with a second hand,
Scan: One day/ I wrote/ her name/ upon/
4.But came the tide, and made my pains his prey12. the strand
5.Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay, Theme: comparing eternal of love and death
to the brevity of life and humanity.
6.A mortal thing so to immortalize,
Structure: The first quatrain is a realistic
7.For I myself shall like to this decay, narration in which the lines 3 & 4 are the first
conflict. The second quatrain is a dialogue
8.And eek my name be wiped out likewise. by a female, most probably the beloved
which is the second conflict. The third
9.Not so, (quod I) let baser things devise quatrain is an answer to the dialogue again
in a conversation because of the use of
10.To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: “quoth I.” And its last line is an idealistic
central image. The couplet at the end gives
11.My verse, your virtues rare shall eternize, the conclusion like a fact because it uses the
present participle tense.
12.And in the heavens write your glorious name13 .
Title: The name Amoretti itself means “little
13.Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, notes” or “little cupids.”
14.Our love shall live, and later life renew.
CONTENT
9 Aim: This poem is said to have been written on Spenser’s love affair and eventual marriage to Elizabeth
Boyle, his second wife. Sonnet 75 centers on the immortality of spiritual love and the temporality of physical
love. The poet has dexterously presented a contrast between the earthly and the celestial ideas and things.
While in the first half of the poem, time and nature destroy the poet’s writing and attempts to immortalize it; in
the second half the poet immortalizes his eternal, spiritual love through his writings.
10Sonnet 75 is taken from Edmund Spenser’s poem Amoretti which was published in 1595. The poem has
been fragmented into 89 short sonnets that combined make up the whole of the poem.
11One of the indirect implications of the typical fifteenth century women being docile and subservient can be
found in the waves being given a masculine quality. Normally, nature is associated with the female entity
because both are responsible for giving and sustaining life. Here, however, the author’s reason for giving a
masculine identity to nature must be because of the malignant role it is playing.
12Personification :The sea or waves are given human qualities. It “washed,” and “made my paynes his pray.”
Washing and preying or inflicting pain upon someone are human qualities. The lover’s writing on the sand
can be a reference to man’s inherent desire to eternalize his being to be remembered forever. The waves
here signify time. The erasing of the name by water signifies the transient nature of human life. It points
towards the futility of man’s aspirations for immortality, especially poets who wish to be eternalized through
their works. However, irrespective of how many times he may try to make his life meaningful, it is pointless.
Everything is transitory and will eventually be destroyed.
13 while the first three evoke negative images, the last one paints a beautiful, fantastical picture in the mind.
10. ❖ He was born at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire.
❖ He was the third of eight children (four girls and four boys) of
John Shakespeare and Mary Arden Shakespeare, who married
in 1557. John Shakespeare, a native of nearby Snitterfield,
crafted gloves, lent money, and traded in wool, barley, timber,
and leather goods in a shop next to his Henley Street home. In
1567, he became the mayor of Stratford.
❖ William Shakespeare may have enrolled at a preschool,
comparable to the modern kindergarten, to study catechism
and the basics of reading and writing. Between ages seven
and thirteen, he probably attended a local grammar school, the
King's New School, to study classical history, religion, ethics,
logic, rhetoric, public speaking, Roman poetry and drama, the
natural sciences, and other subjects taught in Latin by well-
trained teachers from Oxford University. It is likely he also
IV. OUTSTANDING FIGURES AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION
studied the New Testament of the Bible in Greek. Because of
3. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
the broadness and excellence of their education at the
Stratford school, its graduates developed a strong grasp of the
liberal arts. Most important, though, he had a knowledge of
people and the everyday life that surrounded him.
❖ In 1582, when he was 17 William Shakespeare married Anne
Hathaway, 26, the daughter of a thriving farmer in the village of
Shottery, about a mile from Stratford. Hathaway was pregnant
at the time of the marriage. In May 1583, they had a daughter,
Susanna, and in 1585, twins—a boy named Hamnet and a girl
named Judith. Hamnet died 11 years later.
❖ In 1594 he was not only an actor but one of eight harers in the
Lord Chamberlain's men, which meant that he was a part-owner
of that company of actors (which was formed in 1598) receiving a
share of its profits. The patron was the Lord Chamberlain, one of
the Royal Household's main officials.
❖ He wrote one hundred fifty-four sonnets. The topic of most
sonnets written in Shakespeare's time is love–or a theme related
to love. Also he adopted the latter scheme in his sonnets .The
Shakespearean sonnet has three four-line stanzas (quatrains) and
a two-line unit called a couplet. A couplet is always indented; both
lines rhyme at the end. The meter of Shakespeare's sonnets
is iambic pentameter (except in Sonnet 145). The rhyme scheme
is always abab cdcd efef gg.
❖ Shakespeare retired from the theatre in 1610 and returned to
Stratford. Six years later, in 1616, he died on the same date on
which he was believed to have been born, April 23. The cause of
his death is the subject of conjecture.
11. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 14 FORM
Rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg
1.Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Sonnet: Shakespearean, 3 quatrains +
couplet.
2.Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Meter: iambic pentameter.
3.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May 15,
Scan: Shall I/ compare/ thee to/
4.And summer's lease hath all too short a date. a su/mmer's day.
5.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, Theme: ravages of time.
6.And often is his gold complexion dimmed; Structure: Notice that Shakespeare
introduces the main point of the sonnet in
7.And every fair from fair sometime declines, the first two lines of Stanza 1: that the
young man's radiance is greater than the
8.By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; sun's. He then devotes the second two
lines of Stanza 1 and all of Stanza 2 to the
9.But thy eternal summer shall not fade, inferior qualities of the sun. In Stanza 3,
he says the young man's brilliance will
10.Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, never fade because Sonnet XVIII will keep
it alive. He then sums up his thoughts in
11.Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, the ending couplet.
12.When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st16. Title: the title is a rhetorical question that
is asked in order to make a point and
13.So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, without the expectation of a reply.
Tone: This poem is almost certainly
14.So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
addressed to a young man who was
Shakespeare's patron. Therefore it cannot
be considered to be love poem in the
usual sense. The tone should be
respectful, not seductive.
CONTENT
14 Aim: the poet attempts to compare it to a summer's day, but shows that there can be no such comparison,
since the fair lord's timeless beauty far surpasses that of the fleeting, inconstant season.
15note that May was an early summer month in Shakespeare's time, because England did not adopt the
Gregorian calendar until 1752.
16In line 12 we find the poet's solution - how he intends to eternalize the fair lord's beauty despite his refusal
to have a child. The poet plans to capture the fair lord's beauty in his verse ("eternal lines"), which he
believes will withstand the ravages of time. Thereby the fair lord's "eternal summer shall not fade," and the
poet will have gotten his wish. Here we see the poet's use of "summer" as a metaphor for youth, or perhaps
beauty, or perhaps the beauty of youth.