A Brief Introduction to the British Renaissance

Epic

• Single event and focus: in Homer’s Iliad, Achilles’ dispute with the Greek general Agamemnon during the Trojan War; in the Odyssey, Odysseus’ journey home after the War; in Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan exile and the founding of the new Troy—i.e. Rome; and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Fall (and what Northrop Frye called “The Story of All Things”)

• Enclyclopedic: in PL, for example, covering all of (biblical) history, from Creation to Apocalypse; replete with numerous classical allusions; and touching on a range of subjects that includes cosmology, medicine, horticulture, metallurgy, stagecraft, statecraft, politics, warfare, entomology, and rhetoric, to name but a few of Milton’s interests

• Other features:

  • machinery: supernatural agents; in PL, God, Satan, devils, and angels

  • elaborate similes

  • setting vast in scale: all of the known universe

  • in medias res: an epic typically begins “in the middle of things”; PL opens with the exiled Satan and the fallen angels just after the war in heaven

• Sample: Paradise Lost (9.322-41): In Book 9, just prior to the Fall and knowing that some enemy has entered Eden and would try to harm them, Eve and Adam discuss whether it would be wise for them to tend the Garden apart from each other. Adam seems not to trust that Eve can withstand temptation, should it come, to which she takes mild offence and offers the following persuasive argument [audio]:

  If this be our condition, thus to dwell

  In narrow circuit strait’nd by a Foe,

  Suttle or violent, we not endu’d

  Single with like defence, wherever met,

  How are we happie, still in fear of harm?

  But harm precedes not sin: onely our Foe

  Tempting affronts us with his foul esteem

  Of our integritie: his foul esteeme

  Sticks no dishonor on our Front, but turns

  Foul on himself; then wherefore shund or feard

  By us? who rather double honour gaine

  From his surmise prov’d false, find peace within,

  Favour from Heav’n, our witness from th’ event.

  And what is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid

  Alone, without exterior help sustaind?

  Let us not then suspect our happie State

  Left so imperfet by the Maker wise,

  As not secure to single or combin’d.

  Fraile is our happiness, if this be so,

  And Eden were no Eden thus expos’d ...

  To which Adam responds,

  Go; thy stay, not free, absents thee more ...

  The rest, as they say, is history. Eve’s argument, as it happens, mirrors Milton’s own in Areopagitica (1644), the first sustained treatise in English advocating freedom of the press [audio]:

  I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse is but an excrementall whitenesse.

  The difference, perhaps crucial, is that whereas Milton in Areopagitica writes from a fallen perspective, Eve speaks, and Adam responds, in a context we cannot know: that of innocence.

Tragedy

• Great suffering, in three senses of great:

  • of considerable scope and intensity

  • noble, worthy of admiration

  • pertaining to the nobility, persons of high social rank or “great place” (see Francis Bacon’s essay, “Of Great Place”)

  • Courage in the face of inevitable defeat

  • Hero or protagonist (from Greek agon, meaning “struggle”): ethos (“character”) is destiny; Macbeth kills his way to the crown because his ethos, murderous ambition, defines him; Juliet, Shakespeare’s first great tragic poet, loves Romeo to death because rebellion in the service of love defines her character

  • hamartia: from Aristotle’s Poetics, and often translated as “flaw” or “shortcoming,” hamartia is a term from spear-throwing contests and means literally “missing the mark”; the tragic protagonist, in other words, aims high but errs, and the error proves disastrous

  • katharsis: literally “cleansing” or “purging,” this originally medicinal term is Aristotle’s word for the audience’s experience when watching a tragic play, which arouses the powerful emotions of pity and amazement so that the audience might share vicariously in the protagonist’s plight and thereby find relief from their own tragic existence (much as a vaccine protects one from the virus of which it is made)

  • anagnorisis: literally “recognition,” the point at which the hero discovers his/her error; in the best plays, according to Aristotle, this is accompanied by

  • peripeteia, or a “reversal of fortune”—an abrupt shift in circumstances that sends the plot and the tragic hero’s development in an entirely new direction

  In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the recognition and reversal occur simultaneously when Oedipus discovers that he has killed his father and married his mother, at which point he blinds himself.

• Sample: King Lear (4.1.19-27). In a clever variation of Oedipus the King, Shakespeare’s Gloucester is blinded before he realizes his error [audio]:

  Gloucester

  I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;

  I stumbled when I saw: full oft ‘tis seen,

  Our means secure us, and our mere defects

  Prove our commodities ...
  Seeing his blinded and bleeding father, Edgar retracts his earlier statement that things can only get better when Fortune’s wheel is at its lowest point:
  Edgar

         ... the worst is not

  So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’
  In words ironically devastating for the author of the greatest English tragedy, Edgar implies that tragedy is not quite tragedy so long as it can be spoken (or written or performed). Real tragedy, like grief, can only be experienced. The Tragedy of King Lear succeeds precisely because it fails—aiming high, and “missing the mark.”

History Play

Not surprisingly, the most memorable history plays are Shakespeare’s, principally the two “Henriads”: two groups of four plays named for the three kings whose reigns they chronicle—Henry VI, Henry IV, and Henry V. The order here—the sixth Henry first, followed by the fourth and fifth—is deliberate. Written first, the plays Henry VI Parts 1-3 and Richard III dramatize the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, which culminate in the defeat of Richard III and advent of the Tudor dynasty as indicated above. These plays—nationalist celebrations, really—were so popular among Elizabethan audiences, that Shakespeare decided to go back in time to chronicle the events and explore the causes leading to the material he’d covered in the first set of plays.

Though the plays are not historical works per se (and include many inaccuracies, compressed timelines, exaggerations, and mischaracterizations), they do explore the social, political, and ideological issues pertaining to monarchy that were familiar to Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

The most important of these issues might be framed as several questions:

• What is the ideological basis of monarchy?

• What are the limits of its authority? Are there any?

• How is one to understand the relationship between the doctrine of jure divino (the “divine right” of kings) and the sovereign’s obligation to govern his subjects justly?

• What happens when the king or queen is perceived to have mistreated their most powerful subjects, the nobles on whom they rely to help manage the affairs of state?

• Sample: Richard II explores the crisis that arises when the exercise of a king’s authority verges on tyranny. About halfway through the play, the man poised to replace Richard, a character named Bolingbroke (Henry IV by the end of the play), says something that goes to the heart of the conflict between the ideology of divine right and the reality of political struggle. When the king’s and Bolingbroke’s uncle, the Duke of York, chastises one of Bolingbroke’s supporters for verbally disrespecting the king, the following exchange ensues (3.3.15-19) [audio]:

  Bolingbroke

  Mistake not, uncle, further than you should.

  York

  Take not, good cousin [nephew], further than you should,

  Lest you mistake the heavens are over our heads.

  Bolingbroke

  I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself

  Against their will.

  Bolingbroke claims to be keenly aware that the “heavens” are watching, and slyly implies that his opposition to a divinely-appointed king (and by extension his bid for that king’s crown) is not only not opposed to the heavens, but is the will of God. Does he actually believe this? Or, rather, does he say what he knows must be said in order to justify the usurpation that follows? Shakespeare offers no clear answers.

  Indeed, the play concludes with Bolingbroke, now Henry IV, banishing Exton, the man he’d instructed to murder the imprisoned Richard. Why? Because as king, he cannot be seen to tolerate regicide. “They love not poison,” he says, “that do poison need” (5.6.38). Exton is made a scapegoat, the medicinal pharmakos on whom is placed the sins of the state, and carries them away into exile, thereby curing the realm of its necessary poison.

In addition to exploring this potentially explosive topic, the plays are celebrations of English history, as much ritual as entertainment. The first Henriad, for example, concludes with the rise of Henry VII, the first Tudor king and grandfather to Elizabeth I, England’s queen when Shakespeare’s history plays were written and first performed. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Richard III, the Yorkist king defeated by Elizabeth’s Tudor ancestors, is portrayed by Shakespeare as a deformed monster and ruthless tyrant—surely in contrast to the implicitly benevolent and just Elizabeth.

Comedy

Shakespearean comedies, like the tragedies, were written with classical models in mind. These plays typically include some variation of the following features:

• u-shaped plot: begins in stability, descends into adversity, and returns to harmony, the heroes undergoing some sort of transformation in the process

• evitability: whereas tragedy is imbued throughout with a sense of dread and the inevitability of fate, comedy is the realm of the possible, where strange twists in fortune (often magical or supernatural intervention) allow the heroes to overcome the barriers to their happiness

• female heroes: whereas tragedy almost always focuses on male characters, Renaissance comedies typically include more prominent roles for women (though there are exceptions, e.g. Juliet and Cleopatra, both eminent tragic figures)

• blocking figure: adversity in comedy is usually embodied as some patriarchal authority, often a meddling father figure

Comedy and tragedy, though different in many respects, share the same basic tripartite structure: (1) protasis, introducing the major characters, backgrounds, and current circumstances; (2) epitasis, introducing the adversity or problem to be overcome (comedy) or which leads to destruction (tragedy), and developing the action towards its conclusion; and (3) catastrophe, literally “final turn,” the climax towards which the epitasis leads, typically marriage (comedy) or death (tragedy).

The difference between tragedy and comedy plot-wise often turns on a dime, some slight shift in circumstance that sends the plot in one direction or another. To illustrate the similarities between the two, I offer the following descriptions of two Shakespearean plays, the first a comedy, the second a tragedy:

1. Young lovers’ desires are frustrated by parental interference. They escape their adverse circumstances by journeying to another place where, through magical means, everything is sorted out.

2. Young lovers’ desires are frustrated by parental interference. Their efforts to overcome their adversity ultimately fail. They do realize their desires, but only in death.

When Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he was already thinking about Romeo and Juliet. We know this because Dream includes a “play within the play,” a comical interlude based on the tragic story from Ovid known as Pyramus and Thisbe, wherein lovers overcome a literal wall separating their families’ estates. Pyramus, wrongly thinking Thisbe dead, kills himself, whereupon Thisbe, rightly thinking Pyramus dead, follows him into the dark.

Sample: Here are two monologues from the conclusion of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude at the end of Dream. Both are written in the same sing-songy and lighthearted verse form. But whereas the Pyramus (Romeo) speech is inescapably ridiculous and laughable, Thisbe’s (Juliet’s) is plausibly tragic [audio]:

Comedy and tragedy, like the weddings and funerals with which they often conclude, express the extreme poles of human experience. If tragedies are the imaginative embodiment of suffering, comedies are what Northrop Frye called “models of desire”: artistic realizations of the world we want as opposed to the one we have.

Lyric

Sample: Ben Jonson, “On Court Worm,” an epigram (brief, terse, concise, sharply witty). Jonson’s poem keenly observes the life of a courtier, a low-level functionary in a royal court who rises to some level of prominence and affluence only to perish in the end [audio]:

Sample: Mary Wroth, a sonnet from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Reversing the predominant form in which a male lover pursues an unattainable beloved, Wroth’s speaker, Pamphilia (literally “all-loving”), is a woman in love with a married man, Amphilanthus (“lover of two”). Like the best poets of her day, she devised suprising metaphors, sometimes called “metaphysical conceits” for their ingenuity and emotional expressiveness. Here, she startles by combining tyranny and miscarriage in a dual-metaphor expressing unrequited love [audio]:

Sample: John Donne, from “A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.” Donne wrote this poem upon the death of his wife Ann, whom he had married clandestinely, above his social rank and against the wishes of her parents, and was imprisoned briefly because of it. The setting is the winter solstice, at the very end of the shortest day of the year, just as the northern hemisphere will begin its motion toward spring. Here are the final two of five stanzas [audio]:

Final Sample: I conclude by sharing a little of my current scholarship. Below are three poems. The first is a verse letter from George Herbert to Francis Bacon, a prominent figure in the court of James I. It was not uncommon for aspiring courtiers to write poems seeking the favor of a senior figure, and to do so in the erotic mode of love poetry.

Here, Herbert is a young man flattering the elder statesman, Bacon. In the first poem, written in English, he presents to Bacon a gift, what he calls “a Blackamore.” That gift is the second poem, which, in several manuscript copies, accompanies the first poem. Why “Blackamore”? Because this second poem, in Latin, is the complaint of an Ethiopian woman against Cestus, a “man of a different colour,” for refusing to return her love. The two poems are a racialized courtship, in which the dejected black woman of the Latin poem is a stand-in for Herbert, the young courtier seeking the “love” (i.e. social or perhaps political support) of an admired senior member of the Jacobean court.

The third poem, also in Latin, is Cestus’ reply. Below are all three poems, with translations and an image of the manuscript containing the two Latin “Aethiopissa” poems:

1.

2.

3.

You’ll notice, perhaps, that the second Latin poem in the manuscript, Cesti responsio or “Cestus’ Reply,” is subscribed “Finis. Georg: Herbert” (fol. 168). The hand, however, is definitely not Herbert’s, and for reasons too complex to explore here, it is impossible to determine with any certainty that Herbert wrote it. It is unlikely that Bacon wrote the response. It’s not in his hand, he died in 1626, and the manuscript (the only one known to include it) is dated 1639. Herbert died in 1633, which only adds to reasons for doubting the authenticity of the scribal attribution to “Georg: Herbert.” Still, because scribes routinely copied poems from already extant manuscripts, it is at least possible that Herbert is the author. The scribe seemed to think so.

It is also important to bear in mind, finally, that racial (and racist) ideologies as we understand them today were only beginning to emerge in the seventeenth century, so we need to be cautious when assessing the racial dimension of works produced during that time. The second of the two Latin poems, for example, seems clearly to be a cruel rejection of Aethiopissa based on her skin colour, and concludes with a kind of erotic apartheid—despite Cestus’ fleeting admission at line 14 that “indeed, / A radiant body’s sable shadow pleases” (Nigra sed illustris corporis vmbra placet). The absolutist sentiment with which the poem concludes—fate proclaiming that white belongs with white, and black with black—is racialized in a literal sense. But the black/white dichotomy it enacts is rooted in an ancient and value-laden metaphor according to which white (and light) are associated with purity and goodness, black (and darkness) with contamination and evil. Recall, for example, the passage from Milton’s Areopagitica cited above, where true purity is whiteness itself, as though a substance one might possess. The language of “shadow” (vmbrae) introduced by Aethiopissa in the first of the two Latin poems complicates this simplistic binary—a complication that Cestus in response momentarily acknowledges, but completely shuts down in the end.

The first of the two Latin poems, on the other hand, has been read variously as a love elegy satirizing its speaker—a black woman who would presume to love Cestus, this “man of a different colour”—and as a humanizing portrayal of the same. Either way, it is difficult to avoid the fact that Herbert, in giving voice to an Ethiopian woman, put on a kind of literary blackface. (Though blackface is a distinctly modern phenomenon, derived from late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American minstrelsy, the practice of entertaining white Europeans with displays of blackness has been around since at least the fifteenth century. English actors on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, moreover, routinely played black characters—though whether they caricatured supposedly black attributes or altered their appearance in performance is difficult to say.)

Scholars of the British Renaissance are only beginning to grapple with the racial dimension of English culture and letters. I, for one, am certainly baffled by it—just as much of the Renaissance world continues to puzzle me many years after I first encountered it as an undergraduate.

Thanks for taking some time to explore that world with me, and feel free to email me with any questions.