Elizabethan literature

Elizabethan literature refers to the body of groundbreaking British literary works—largely poetry and drama but a significant body of nonfiction as well—that were produced during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). During the Elizabethan era, England enjoyed unprecedented economic, political, and military stability. The era marked the beginnings of what would become the British Empire. The literature reflects that sense of confidence and optimism. Drawing on models that showed a cultural respect for the late works of the Italian Renaissance, the literature of Elizabethan England nevertheless reflected a robust and vigorous willingness to reinvestigate traditional literary forms and to revisit traditional literary themes—a concerted effort that would create a distinctly British literary tradition.

Background

Although Elizabeth I reigned for nearly fifty years, the signature works of Elizabethan literature were published relatively late in her reign; cultural historians frequently cite the overwhelming defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the attendant boost to national pride as key to the flourishing of the arts thereafter. Many of the signature writers of the era were still productive in the years after Elizabeth’s death. Despite the rich variety of work produced during the era, the poetry, drama, and nonfiction do share significant elements, including a respect for art as craft but a fearless willingness to expand and reinvent inherited forms; a fascination with the complexity of the human heart, the often sensational extremes of emotion (most notably love and vengeance), and the complicated, often ambiguous motivations of people under great stress; a profound, even luxuriant love of language and the sonic appeal of words; and an abiding sense of the prominent social role of the writer as an integral part of a vibrant national community.

Elizabethan drama is the genre that stands out perhaps most prominently. Although dominated then as now by the rich versatility of William Shakespeare—whose comedies, romances, tragedies, and histories often drew on (and celebrated) Britain’s own monarchical lines—London’s thriving theatrical world drew as well on the considerable talents of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, and Francis Beaumont, to name only a few. Elizabethan theater greatly expanded the range of dramatic works by positioning noble if fallible characters in complex moral dilemmas; reimagining the dramatic space of the theater itself, using what was then cutting-edge technology to create sound and visual effects; and employing the flexibility of dramatic blank verse to elevate the theatrical literary experience. Although thematically the works upended centuries of assumptions and simplifications about humanity’s moral makeup and often challenged audiences to think in new ways about love, power, and death, Elizabethan drama drew unapologetically on the ancient imperative of theater to engage, enthrall, and entertain. The comedies were often farces with clever wordplay and sidesplitting slapstick, and the dramas most often climaxed in sweeping acts of bloody, murderous vengeance or in grand moments of heroic death.

Although dramatic works of the Elizabethan era continue to enjoy great popularity, thanks largely to Shakespeare, the same cannot be said about the era’s poetry, which can seem by contemporary standards to be artificial and overwrought and in most cases important only in its historical context. If Shakespeare looms large in the signature work of Elizabethan drama, Edmund Spenser (1552–99) serves a similar function in its poetry. Spenser reinvented poetic line itself, introducing what has come to be called the Spenserian verse line, a rich combination of pre-set rhythms and rhyme (ababbcbcc) and a pre-set number of lines for each stanza (nine) that challenged the craft of the poet to shape the work into that metric condition. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a long (and ultimately unfinished) work published in installments from 1590 to 1609, was a sumptuous allegory for the reign of Elizabeth herself that ultimately celebrated not so much the queen as the possibilities of language, the grand use of allusions, the sonic appeal of words, and the clever, deft line construction within the restrictions of the poetic form. Although it attracts few readers today, it stands as the monumental achievement of Elizabethan poetry. Far more familiar to a contemporary reader is Shakespeare’s body of 154 sonnets, which reshaped the inherited Petrarchan sonnet form by experimenting with three quatrains and a couplet and treated a variety of grand emotional moments, most prominently love, art, and mortality.

Despite not developing the same contemporary following as the dramatic works or even the poetry, the nonfiction works of Elizabethan literature mark considerable milestones in the evolution of the essay as a finely honed rhetorical form. Nonfiction, previously largely church-related work such as sermons and scriptural exegesis, expanded its range of expository subjects to include abstract concepts such as love, truth, and beauty. Given the rise of the British Empire and the first flush of global dominance, the era encouraged histories, nonfiction that greatly expanded the reach and expectations of historical records, and chronicles of Britain’s rise from its mythological past to its status as world power. Also, the era saw the first real attempts by writers to explicate the artistic process itself, and to account for its worth and value—in short, the first major works of what would become known as literary criticism.

Today

With the obvious exception of Shakespeare, most of the works from the flowering of Elizabethan literature have largely slipped from the contemporary literary canon and are interesting largely to students of the era itself and as part of academic programs. But in a real sense, the literature of Elizabethan England, taking its cue from the country’s own decisive movement toward independence and empowerment, created a sustained and authentic British voice, a vast and varied body of literature that sought consciously to reshape inherited literary traditions from the European continent and to reimagine them into artifacts that would become the first distinctly British literature.

Bibliography

Anderson, David K. Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion and Violence on Stage. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Print.

Aydelotte, Frank. Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913. Print.

Brown, Georgia. Redefining Elizabethan Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.

Saintsbury, George. A History of Elizabethan Literature. New York: Russell, 1970. Print.

Syme, Holger Schott. Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

Wilson, A. N. The Elizabethans. New York: Farrar, 2012. Print.