Elizabethan Prose

John Lyly (1554-1606) was the first in date of the writers who consciously and persistently used an artistic style and whose chief aspiration was to say a thing well.

His famous book is Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit.

Peculiar style – ‘Eupuism’. Its chief characteristics are:

1) the excessive use of antithesis, which is pursued regardless of sense, and emphasized by alliteration and other devices (e.g. Lyly favours double alliterations, which he can make direct or crossed, as in “the hot liver of a heedless lover”; “Let my rude birth excuse my bold request”);

2) allusions to historical and mythological personages and to natural history drawn from classical writers.

For all its artificiality Lyly’s prose aimed at beauty. He was a refined, even mannered writer who catered for a cultivated audience, fine lords and ladies who liked what was witty and refined. He seemed entirely regardless of any larger public.

Lyly’s strange and affected way of writing set the fashion for a long period; the ‘euphuistic’ manner spread through almost all literature. Subsequently, the word euphuism lost is exact meaning and became synonymous with every kind of affectation and preciosity. The epithet was stretched to include the various artifices of Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne.

3. The main form of literary expression during the Elizabethan age was drama. It was certainly the Golden age of English drama.

a). The beginnings of English drama.

Up to the end of the sixteenth century England had very strong traditions of medieval popular drama.

Very few examples have survived from what must have been once a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the fifteenth century includes some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or Anglo-Norman according to the composition of the audience.

The main dramatic genres discernable from the fourteenth century onward are mystery playsandmorality plays.

The first English plays told religious stories and were performed in or near churches. Many events of religious history were suitable subjects for drama.

These first plays were called mystery or miracle plays. Those were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall and Redemption of mankind based mostly on biblical narration. They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passions of Jesus Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgement.

The cycles were generally financed and performed by craft guilds and staged on wagons (called pageants) in the streets and squares of towns. The texts of the mysteries have survived in four main cycles, according to the city where they were acted: York, Chester, Wakefield and an unstated location in East Anglia, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven.

With the Reformation and the rise of the Puritans the cycles died out or were deliberately suppressed by the Church.

Morality plays were allegoric dramas depicting the progress of a single character, representing the whole of mankind, from the cradle to the grave, and sometimes beyond. The other dramatic personae might include God, Devil, but usually consisted of personified abstractions, such as Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy and so forth. There survived an interesting collection of moralities known as Marco plays (The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is undoubtedly Everyman, a superb English rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of coming death.

Both mystery and morality plays have been frequently revived and performed in the twentieth century.

The Interlude .Interludes were plays performed at Court, in the halls of nobles, and in colleges, generally but not exclusively by professional actors, dealing with a short episodes and involving a limited number of characters. Their vogue was chiefly in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The succeed morality plays in the history of drama, and are not always clearly distinguishable from them. The characters are still frequently allegorical, but the comic or farcical element is more prevalent, and they are shorter than the moralities

The origin of the name is obscure. Perhaps, they were played between the acts of long moralities, may be in the middle of meals. Those were funny, played away from churches, in rich men’s houses or gardens.

e.g. The Four P’s. A prize is offered for the greatest lie. It is won by a man who says he never saw a woman out of patience.

b) Interludes and morality plays continued to be popular down to Shakespeare’s lifetime, but the development of drama into a sophisticated art form required another influence, the classics.

In universities ancient classical plays were acted. Gradually they began to adjust the material to England’s situation. In this way the first comedies appeared. The first English comedy was Ralph Roister Doister . It was written in 1552 by a schoolmaster, Nicholas Udall, and based upon the classical comedies his students had been reading. Another comedy, staged at Cambridge about the same time, Gammar Gurton’s Needle, also put native English material into a classical form.

Many varieties of comedy developed during the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, influenced by classical models and French and Italian examples.

The conventions of romantic comedy call for noble characters and a central love plot. (Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; As You Like It)

Domestic comedy has a domestic situation at the center of the plot.

City comedy typically had bourgeois characters, a London setting and much satire.

Humour comedy has type characters created on the theory the predominance of a particular fluid, or humor, in the body creates a special temperament (melancholic, choleric, splenetic, phlegmatic). (Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and others)

Jonson also wrote classical intrigue comedies with their complex, well-paced plots, witty dialogue and characters based on classical types.

Tragicomedy was a mixed type, in which evils and problems which seem destined to end tragically are brought to a sudden happy resolution. (Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and in a different mood, The Winter’s Tale).

Elizabethan tragedyalso began with a fusion of classical and medieval elements. It owed much to the tragedies of Seneca which portray the Roman goddess Fortuna turning her wheel, and bringing low those who were high. English tragedies took over very different elements from Seneca: violent and bloody plots, resounding rhetorical speeches, frequent use of ghosts among the cast of characters, the five-act structure.

The first regular English tragedy was Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. It was written by two lawyers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton. Significantly, it was written in blank verse, which began the establishment of this form as the accepted medium for English tragedy. In due course it developed into “Marlowe’s mighty line” and Shakespeare’s wonderfully flexible and expressive poetry.

Several distinct varieties of tragedy developed during the Elizabethan period. The Senecan influence remained pervasive giving rise to the subgenre of revenge tragedy, in which a wronged protagonist plots and executes revenge destroying himself in the process. (Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy; Shakespeare’s Hamlet for all its complexity is also of the kind)

The villain tragedy (related, but distinct), in which the protagonist is blatantly evil (Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Richard III, Marlowe’s Jew of Malta).

The heroic tragedy – the character is larger than life, constantly challenging the limits of human possibitity. (Marlowe’s heroes – Dr. Faustus and Tamberlaine; Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra)

This exuberant era also gave rise to dramatic kinds that fall quite outside the boundaries of comedy and tragedy.

The masque – an entertainment that combined dance, song, dialogue and spectacle. There were masques at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, but the form was especially fostered by the Stuart monarchs.

The history play took its subjects from English history, was especially suited to reflect the nationalistic sentiment.

The flowering of English drama depended on professional actors, a theatre, and an audience. The earliest drama was acted by members of the clergy in the church; medieval mysteries and moralities were played by amateurs (members of the local trade guilds; servants). Some nobles maintained a company of actors as personal servants. Even in Shakespeare’s time the professional acting companies attached themselves to a nobleman and were technically his servants (The Lord Chamberlain’s Men; the Lord Admiral’s Men), even though their income came from the public. The rise in the social status of actors during Shakespeare’s lifetime is illustrated by the fact that he and his fellows were made officers of the royal household and became known as the King’s men, when James I came to the throne.

At first acting companies played in various places – great houses, makeshift stages, inn-yards. The first theatre was built was James Burbage in 1576 – The Theatre. It was outside the limits of the City of London, and beyond the jurisdiction of the city authorities, who were generally hostile to dramatic spectacles. Soon other public theatres were erected: usually oval in shape; with an unroofed yard in the centre and covered seats for the spectators of higher social status. Plays were acted at high speed with no act-and-scene breaks we are used to; no scenery, but elaborate costumes. Performances were given in the afternoon and were subject to cancellation by bad weather or epidemics of plaque that periodically ravaged the city. Before long there appeared enclosed private theatres. The companies were “repertory” – fulfilled the roles by the members of their group without employing outsiders. The plays might be bought or written by a playwright inside the company. The text remained the company’s property, though sometimes the company had trouble achieving effective control over its rights to the play.

Soon there appeared professional playwrights too. A famous group of Elizabethan playwrights and pamphleteers got the name of University Wits. They included Nashe, R. Greene, Lyly.

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