Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 1. New York: Norton, 2000.

The Early Seventeenth Century, 1603-1660

When Queen Elizabeth died on March 24, 1603, after more than four decades on the throne, her kinsman James VI of Scotland succeeded her as James I of England without the disruptions or attempted coups that had been feared. 1209

But there was also cause for unease, as the nation saw itself exchanging an English Deborah, whom God had favored with a miraculous victory over the Spanish Armada and who had declared herself married to her people, for an aloof Scotsman with a foreign entourage that might displace English place-seekers. 1209

terms suited to his [James’s] patriarchal and absolutist style. 1210

They span the centuries (roughly 1500—1700) that scholars refer to as the Renaissance when they mean to emphasize breaks with medieval culture and the Early Modern Period when they mean to emphasize seeds of the modern world. Nor do authors’ lives and careers neatly conform to the conventional periods. Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies and romances in James I’s reign; Donne wrote his elegies, satires, and some love poems in the last decade of Queen Elizabeth’s. Milton completed Paradise Lost and wrote two other major poems in the 1660s. 1210

The Stuart kings, James I and his son Charles I, were unable to do this, engaging in constant confrontations with their Parliaments / and subject over taxes, religion, unpopular ministers, and parliamentary rights. Elizabeth did not try to define precisely how power is divided in what was usually described as a “mixed” government of Monarch, Lords, and Commons. James, while yet in Scotland, published two arguments for royal absolutism. The True Law of Free Monarchies (1597) and Basilikon Doran (1598). These works, both reissued in 1603, proclaim the divine right of kings as God’s deputies and as fathers of their people and explain that monarchs are “free” in that they are accountable only to God. A series of analogies is seen to structure a patriarchal social order: as God is absolute ruler of the universe, so is the king of his people and the father of his family. 1211

Such sentiments, not surprisingly, gave rise to widespread rumors of homosexual activities at court. The rumors are certainly plausible, thought the surviving evidence of same-sex relationships in Early Modern England is extremely difficult to interpret. Sodomy was a crime punishable by death, but prosecutions were extremely rare. English law simply declined to recognize the possibility of lesbian acts. From Shakespeare’s sonnets to James’s letters, we find avowals of love and desire between men which may sometimes be formal expressions of affection based on classical models, or, alternatively, expressions of passionate physical and spiritual love. 1211

The discovery and thwarting of the “Gunpowder Plot” in 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and a band of Roman Catholic conspirators plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament and seize control of the government, unified English Protestants in a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment and support for the monarch. James, it seemed, had been preserved by a divine miracle even as Elizabeth had been by the defeat of the Armada. Also, the king’s sponsorship of the so-called King James Bible (the Authorized Version, 1611) was a powerful force for Protestant unity. 1212

From the other side, Puritans, as they were disparagingly called, pressed for more reformation in doctrine, ritual, and especially in church government, so as to bring the English church into closer conformity with the Presbyterian Church organization in Geneva, as established by the Protestants reformer John Calvin. 1212

The appointment in 1633 of William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury, the ecclesiastical head of the English Church, proved to be a watershed event. Throughout the 1630s Laud promoted the rapid growth of a high Anglican faction within the church, conforming its ceremony, ritual, and doctrine more closely to Roman Catholicism. 1213

Donne was especially fond of the macrocosm/microcosm parallel according to which the human being is seen as “a little world” or recapitulation of the world itself; and almost everyone believed in some version of the “chain” of being that links and orders all species hierarchically. 1214

But this system [chain of being], with it’s a priori assumptions and reliance upon ancient authority, was challenged by Francis Bacon’s new emphasis on scientific method, as well as by actual experiments such as William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood and Galileo’s telescope, which supplied evidence confirming the Copernican astronomy. Galileo dislodged the earth from its former fixed and stable position at the center of the cosmos and, in defiance of all ordinary observation, sent it whirling around the sun; he also found evidence of change and corruption in the heavens and advanced mind-boggling speculations about life on other planets and infinite universes. Donne, like other writers of his age, responded to the new ideas, giving voice to the anxieties they produced in his Anatomy of the World:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

1215

Gifted Church of England preachers like Donne . . . called on all the resources of artful rhetoric and elegant style to enthrall their congregations. 1216

The theaters continued to flourish in the Liberties just outside the City, and therefore not under London’s jurisdiction; this was the only sphere in which authors could support themselves by writing. Shakespeare was at the height of his powers: King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and several others were staged during the early years of James’s reign. 1216

Several prominent Elizabethan genres were no longer much in evidence: long allegorical or mythological narratives, sonnet sequences, and pastoral poems. 1216

John Donne, whose imprudent marriage cost him a much desired career in the court bureaucracy but who later became a famous preacher and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, cast himself in the older mold of gentleman amateur, circulating his poems in manuscript to friends and coterie circles, and largely avoiding print publication (his poems were published posthumously in 1633). In both their style and their content, Donne’s poems were designed to be read by a select few rather than the public at large. His best poems explore the private worlds of love and religion, often developing passionate dialectical arguments that set them in anxious opposition to the public world. 1217

His style is characterized by learned terms and images, speechlike and often unmelodic verses, and strikingly dramatic language that often evokes a scene in progress. It is also characterized by witty play with paradoxes, ironies and the conjunction of opposites, as in the so-called “metaphysical conceit”—a surprising that metaphor that (as Samuel Johnson later observed) links together images from very different ranges of experience. Donne took particular delight in challenging his sophisticated readers by interchanging the vocabularies of sexual and religious love both in his love poems and in his religious poems. Donne has sometimes been regarded as the founder of a “metaphysical school” of poetry, but that classification is not very useful. 1217

The Jacobean era (so-called from King James I) . . . 1218

there is no doubt that the twenty-year revolutionary period left the English economy far more open to the development of capitalist production. It also saw the development of concepts central to bourgeois liberal thought and soon to influence John Locke and the theorists of the American and French revolutions: religious toleration, separation of church and state, social contract, popular sovereignty, representative government, and republicanism. 1221

Puritans were united in passionate opposition to the bishops, associating them with popery, tyranny over conscience, evil counsel to the king, and pompous excesses in lifestyle. Many, including Milton, demanded that they be cast out of the church, “root and branch.” 1221

Milton’s commitment to the revolution was unwavering, early to late, despite his disillusion when it failed to realize his fundamental ideals: religious toleration for all Protestants and the free circulation of ideas without prior censorship. 1229

He was a Puritan, but both his theological heterodoxies and his poetic vision mark him as a distinctly unusual one. 1229