Famous Elizabethans and Their Era Essay

The archetypical about who we will trounce is Edmund Spenser (1522-1599), who was an English poet outflank known for The faggot Queene, an epic poem and marvellous allegory celebrating the Tudor Dynasty and Elizabeth I. he is recognized as hotshot of the phase modulation craftsmen of Modern English measure in its infancy, and unrivaled of the big(p)est poets in the English language. The first poesys incessantly published by Spenser were six sonnets translated from Petrarch. correspondly followed The Shepherds Calendar, whose subject was suggested to him by Sydney. In writing it, Spenser workoutd foreign poseurs derived from unblemished poetry, Latin, French, and Italian lit timeture.The verses be still in truth conventional and show transparent signs of immaturity, the content is mythological-scholarly, though there are umpteen beautiful descriptions of English rural scenery. The melody is often interrupted however, it inaugurates a new era in English poetry. Thi s new era is superbly by The Faerie Queene. The models which Spenser used when he embarked upon the difficult task of composing this poem, the about cardinal and popular of all that he ever wrote, were Ariostos Orlando furioso and Tassos Gerusalemme Liberato.Conceived in the midst of the uncanny beauties of the Irish landscape, The Faerie Queene is far from indifferent to them, conclusion in them an central source of inspiration for his natural background as important as medieval English and Celtic poetry were for the register. The head task Spenser set himself was to amalgamate all these poeticalal elements and, by compound the honorable content of court poetry and by fertilizing it with the new benevolentistic ideas, to write an impressive national epic. Few poems more cl ahead of time flesh out the variety of influences from which most great literary works result.In many respects the most aim source was the body of Italian romances of chivalry, especially the Orland o Furioso of Ariosto, which was written in the early part of the sixteenth century. These romances, in turn, coincide the personages of the medieval French epics of Charlemagne with something of the spirit of Arthurian romance and with a conversion atmosphere of magic and of rich fantastic dishful. Spenser borrows and absorbs all these things and moreover he imitates Ariosto closely, often merely translating whole passages from his work.But this use of the Italian romances, further, carries with it a large employment of characters, incidents, and imagery from undefiled mythology and literature, among other things the elaborated similes of the classical epics. Spenser himself is directly influenced, excessively, by the medieval romances. Most important of all, all these elements are shaped to the offer of the poem by Spensers high moral aim, which in turn springs largely from his Platonic rarifiedism. To the spectator of Spensers imagination, ideal and sensuous, corresponds h is magnificent command of rhythm and of sound.As a verbal melodist, especially a melodist of sweetness and of stately grace, and as a harmonist of prolonged and complex cadences, he is unsurpassable. But he has full command of his rhythm concord to the subject, and can range from the most delicate suggestion of airy beauty to the roar of the tempest or the strident energy of battle. In phraseology and phraseology his fluency appears inexhaustible. Here, as in The Shepherds Calendar, he deliberately introduces, especially from Chaucer, obsolete words and forms, such as the inflectional ending in -en which distinctly contrisolelye to his romanticistic effect.His constant use of alliteration is very skilful the frequency of the alliteration on w is conspicuous nonwithstanding apparently accidental. For the external medium of all this beauty Spenser, modifying the ottava rima of Ariosto (a stanza which rimes abababcc), invented the stanza which bears his own name and which is the exclusively artificial stanza of English origin that has ever passed into currency. The rime-scheme is ababbcbcc and in the last line the iambic pentameter gives place to an Alexandrine (an iambic hexameter).Whether or non any stanza form is as considerably adapted as pr even offt verse or the rimed couple for prolonged narrative is an interesting question, but there can be no surmise that Spensers stanza, firmly unified, in spite of its length, by its central couplet and by the finality of the last line, is a discovery of genius, and that the Alexandrine, forever hint for the next stanza, does a good deal to bind the stanzas together. It has been adopted in no infinitesimal number of the superior subsequent English poems, including such various ones as Burns Cotters Saturday Night, Byrons Childe Harold,Keats Eve of St. Agnes, and Shelleys Adonais. In general style and spirit, it should be added, Spenser has been one of the most functionful influences on all succeeding English romantic poetry. Two further sentences of Lowell well essencemarize his whole general achievement His great merit is in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm. He is a standing protest against the tyranny of the Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the dull uses to which it may be put. The next famous Elizabethan that should be mentioned and about whom we will sterilise a few references concerning his life, his work and his innovations in literature is Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), who was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonist, and his mysterious death. Marlowes reputation as a playing periodtist rests on five plays Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Dido, Queen of Cartage.To these five masterpieces might be added The Massacre of Paris, a bloody-thirsty melodrama now, it seems, little read. In this handful of plays appears the first straight voice of the Renaissance, of the cessation of a new learning, new freedom, new enterprise, of the period of worship of Man rather than God. Marlowe sums up the new age. The old restrictions of the church service and the limitation on knowledge open been destroyed the world is enterprisingness up and the ships are sailing to new lands wealth is be amassed the great national aggressors are rising.But, preceding(prenominal) all, it is the spirit of humanity freedom, of limit slight human power and enterprise that Marlowes plays convey. Tamburlaine is the great conqueror, the embodiment of tyrannical power Barabas, the Jew of Malta, stands for monetary power Faustus represents the most deadly hunger of all, for the power which ultimate knowledge can give. Each one of Christopher Marlowes plays is, in a sense, a tour de force, a special creat ion. The Jew of Malta, Dido, and The Massacre of Paris, though exuberant in passages of strength yet do non fulfill the requirements the informant himself had set up.The Jew, however, was very popular, being performed thirty-six times in foursome years, which in those days was an unusual record. Marlowes first and most important service to drama was the improvement of blank verse. Greene had condemned its use as being unscholarly Sackville and Norton had used it, but were non able to lift it above commonplace. In their work, it usually consisted of isolated lines, one following a nonher, with no mathematical group according to suasion. All the verses were made after one rhythmical pattern, with the akin number of feet and the caesura always in place.Marlowe invented numberless variations while still tutelage the satisfying rhythm within a recurring pattern. Sometimes he left a redundant syllable, or left the line one syllable short, or fly the coopd the position of the cae sura. He grouped his lines according to the thought and adapted his various rhythms to the ideas. Thus blank verse became a life history organism, plastic, brilliant, and finished. Marlowes second best gift to drama was his conception of the courageous tragedy built on a grand scale, with the three-fold unity of character, impression, and interest, instead of the artificial unities of time and place. originally his time tragedies were built either according to the loose style of the chronicle, or within the mechanical framework of the Seneca model but in either case the dramatic unity win by the Greeks was lacking. Marlowe and Shakespeare, with their disregard of the so-called classic rules, were in fact much(prenominal) nearer the spirit of Aeschylus and Sophocles than the slavish followers of the pseudo-classic schools. Marlowe painted gigantic ambitions, desires for unimaginable things, longings for a beauty beyond earthly conception, and sovereigns destroyed by the very pow ers which had raised them to their thrones.Tamburlaine, Faust, Barabbas are the personifications of arrogance, ambition and greed. There is sometimes a impinging of the extravagant or bombastic, or even of the puerile in his plays, for he had no sense of humor nor had he the ability to portray a woman. He wrote no drama on the subject of love. Furthermore, his world is not altogether our world, but a remote field of the imagination. It has been remarked that in Marlowes superb verse there is very little to indicate that the source had ever encountered any human beings. 1In spite of this, he was great, both as a dramatist and poet. His short life, the haste of his work, the irregularities of his habits, these things combined to keep him from perfecting the creations of his imagination. interpreted together, his plays imposed a standard upon all succeeding theatrical compositions. Before him, in England, there was no play of great importance but after him, and based upon his work as a model, rose the greatest drama of English history.A friendlier critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, observes of this poet that the father of English tragedy and the overlord of English blank verse was therefore also the teacher and the train of Shakespeare. In this sentence there are deuce misleading assumptions and two misleading conclusions. Kyd has as good a title to the first honour as Marlowe Surrey has a better title to the second and Shakespeare was not taught or guided by one of his predecessors or contemporaries alone.The less questionable judgment is, that Marlowe exercised a strong influence over later drama, though not himself as great a dramatist as Kyd that he introduced several new tones into blank verse, and commenced the dissociative act which drew it farther and farther away from the rhythms of rhymed verse and that when Shakespeare borrowed from him, which was sensibly often at the beginning, Shakespeare either made something inferior or something different.To su m up we can say that Marlowes major contribution to the Elizabethan drama is due to his vigorous and masterly use of blank verse (his mighty line) a poetic form consisting of unrhymed iambic pentameters which is much nearer to conversational, natural English than any other measured form. It is vigorous, flexible, and it can suit itself to the necessities of declamation, oratory, exposition, speechmaking, etc. , being used by Shakespeare himself to exceeding effect. The last but not the to the lowest degree famous Elizabethan we have to speak is Ben Johnson (1572-1637), who was an English renaissance dramatist, poet and actor.A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best and his lyrical poems. A man of vast reading and unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets. The second place among the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatis ts is universally assigned, on the whole justly, to Ben Jonson, who both in temperament and in esthetical theories and practice presents a complete contrast to Shakespeare.Most conspicuous in his dramas is his realism, often, as we have said, extremely coarse, and a direct reflection of his intellect, which was as strongly masculine as his body and altogether lacking, where the regular drama was concerned, in fineness of sentiment or poetic feeling. He early assumed an attitude of pronounced opposition to the Elizabethan romantic plays, which seemed to him not only lawless in artistic structure but shadowy and trifling in atmosphere and substance. That he was not, however, as has sometimes been said, personally hostile to Shakespeare is clear, among other things, from his poetic tributes in the folio edition of Shakespeare and from his direct statement elsewhere that he loved Shakespeare almost to idolatry. ) Jonsons purpose was to present life as he believed it to be he was good acquainted with its worser side and he refused to conceal anything that appeared to him significant.His plays, therefore, have very much that is flatly offensive to the taste which seeks in literature, prevailingly, for idealism and beauty but they are, nevertheless, generally speaking, powerful portrayals of actual life. Jonsons purpose, however, was never unworthy rather, it was distinctly to uphold morality. His frankest plays, as we have indicated, are attacks on vice and folly, and sometimes, it is said, had important reformatory influence on contemporary manners. He held, indeed, that in the drama, even in comedy, the function of teaching was as important as that of giving pleasure.His attitude toward his audiences was that of a learned schoolmaster, whose ideas they should accept with deferential respect and when they did not approve his plays he was outspoken in indignant contempt. Jonsons complacence and his critical sense of intellectual superiority to the generality of mankind receive also a marked and disagreeable lack of sympathy in his portrayal of both life and character. The world of his dramas is mostly made up of knaves, scoundrels, hypocrites, fools, and dupes and it includes among its really important characters very few excellent men and not a single really good woman.Jonson viewed his fellow-men, in the mass, with complete scorn, which it was one of his moral and artistic principles not to disguise. His peculiarity comedies all belong, further, to the particular theatrical role which he himself originated, namely, the Comedy of Humors. In opposition to the free Elizabethan romantic structure, Jonson stood for and deliberately intended to revive the classical style though with characteristic good sense he declared that not all the classical practices were applicable to English plays. He generally bserved unity not only of action but also of time (a single day) and place, sometimes with expert resultant loss of probability. In his t ragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, he excluded comic material for the most part he kept scenes of death and violence off the form and he very carefully and slowly constructed plays which have nothing, indeed, of the poetic richness of Sophocles or Euripides ( rather a Jonsons broad solidity) but which move steadily to their climaxes and then on to the catastrophes in the compact classical manner.He carried his scholarship, however, to the point of pedantry, not only in the illustrative extracts from Latin authors with which in the printed edition he filled the lower half of his pages, but in the plays themselves in the scrupulous exactitude of his rendering of the details of Roman life.The plays mend the ancient world with much more minute accuracy than do Shakespeares the student should consider for himself whether they succeed better in reproducing its human reality, making it a living part of the readers psychogenic and spiritual possessions. Jonsons style in his plays, especial ly the blank verse of his tragedies, exhibits the same general characteristics. It is strong, compact, and sometimes powerful, but it entirely lacks imaginative poetic beauty, it is really only rhythmical prose, though sometimes suffused with passion.Last, and not least Jonsons revolt from romanticism to classicism initiated, chiefly in non-dramatic verse, the impulsion for restraint and regularity, which, making slow headway during the next half century, was to add in the triumphant pseudo-classicism of the generations of Dryden and Pope. Thus, notable in himself, he was significant also as one of the moving forces of a great literary revolution.